The Hanging Tree

2 Teenage Kicks

Guleed had to arrest her; she had no choice. The brief knew it, too, but before he could get his mouth open Guleed was on her feet and doing the caution. Lady Ty, who’d been staring disbelievingly at her daughter, snapped her head around to look at Guleed — and there was an expression I never thought to see on her face. Abject fear. It was gone in an instant, replaced by a look of calm determination which is the signal for any sensible son of West Africa that it is way past time to be vacating the area. She stood up, and as she did I felt a sudden drag, as if I’d been caught in an icy undertow. I swear the mugs on the drying rack by the sink started to rattle.

I followed her up and said her name as loudly and as forcefully as I dared.

‘Tyburn.’

She glared at me and then down at her daughter, who was looking up at all the grown-ups with a shocked expression that showed that only now, at the end, did she understand the sheer depth of the shit she’d just dropped herself in. Looking back, I reckon the only reason it didn’t all go pear-shaped right there in the kitchen was because Lady Ty couldn’t figure out which one of us she was more pissed off with.

‘Why don’t we all sit down,’ said Guleed, ‘while I arrange some transportation?’

Me and Tyburn took our seats but I noticed Guleed fade out the kitchen door, the better to demand shitloads of back-up. We were going to need transportation back to Belgravia, a search team for the house plus, please god, some Falcon back-up for me and a senior officer to throw the warm comforting blanket of rank over the whole proceedings.

‘Am I really under arrest?’ asked Olivia.

The brief cleared his throat.

‘You,’ said Lady Ty to her daughter. ‘Not one more word. You,’ she said to the solicitor. ‘I want the best criminal solicitor you know waiting for us at the police station when we get there.’

The solicitor gulped, bobbed his head, and opened his mouth to speak before thinking better of it. Pausing only to gather up his briefcase and papers he made a speedy exit from the kitchen.

‘I—’ said Olivia.

‘Shut up, you stupid little girl,’ said Tyburn.

And so we sat in silence for the ten minutes it took Guleed to rustle up some official transport, whereupon she returned to the kitchen and told Olivia that she would have to accompany her to the station. We all stood up again, but this time Lady Ty had herself under control and she watched her daughter being led away without any major property damage.

Although I did make a mental note to check with Thames Water that afternoon – just in case.

‘Is this your idea of three bags full?’ she said once we were alone. ‘I should have left you under the ground.’

And it was while I’d been underground that I’d had what I thought at the time was hallucination. A waking dream that I’d stood on the Oxford Road when it was a ribbon of dust through the countryside and talked to a young man with a sword at his hip and a gleam in his eye. The locals called him Sir William and he wanted me to stay to have a chat but I had business in the land of the living. When I was done with that I enlisted the help of the Folly’s official archivist, Dr Harold Postmartin, to see what the histories said. We tracked down a reference to him in the Rotuli Parliamentorum which as any fule kno is all in Latin – he was listed as Sir William of Tyburn, although the translation could have been read as ‘of the Tyburn’.

I’d have liked to ask Lady Ty whether our young Sir William had been an earlier incarnation of the Tyburn and did she have any memory of him or sense of continuity or was there a total break when he ‘died’ in the mid-nineteenth century.

But it’s a wise man who knows when to keep his gob shut, and so we spent what felt like a really long time in silence until finally Lady Ty’s head jerked round to face the front of the house.

‘Well, that’s you off the hook,’ she said. ‘Your Lord and Master has arrived.’ A couple of moments later Nightingale opened the kitchen door and stepped in. He gave Lady Ty a formal little nod.

‘Cecelia,’ he said. ‘How are you holding up?’

‘Oh, I’m just gratified to be getting the personal touch,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you come with me,’ said Nightingale, ‘and we’ll see if we can sort this out.’

It’s what you say, even to people standing over the bleeding body of their significant other with a claw hammer in their hand. And the weird thing is that most people, even the ones that have got to know that whatever happens it isn’t going to end well for them, come along quietly and let themselves be sorted out.

I didn’t think that Lady Ty was going to stay quiet indefinitely but, sometimes, that’s the joy of being a lowly constable. You get to foist your problems onto your elders and betters.

Before he left the kitchen Nightingale caught my eye and gestured upwards – he wanted me to check Olivia’s bedroom before the main search team got there.

The problem with forensics is that the better it gets, the more inconvenient it is to work around. In the old days the police could get away with clomping around in their size twelves and poking things with a pencil. Now they can pull a viable DNA result off a sample the size of ladybird’s eyeball and you’ve got to be wearing gloves at the very least. I used to walk around with a spare pair of gloves in my pocket, but now I’ve got a set of booties in there as well – just to be on the safe side. You’ve got to watch those booties when walking on polished wood though, so I left them off until I’d located Olivia’s room on the second floor.

It was a big room, expensively wallpapered in a subtle blue and lavender pattern with reconditioned sash windows that looked out over the street. The high ceiling had its original plaster mouldings and it was, if you threw in the en-suite bathroom, about two thirds the size of my parents’ flat. Her walk-in wardrobe was easily the size of my old bedroom and totally wasted because, as far as I could tell, the bulk of Olivia’s clothes were spread out in a nice even layer across the floor.

I stooped to check some of the labels – mostly high-end high street with a couple of designer bits. In contrast, her shoes were neatly ranked on a set of purpose-built shelves at the foot of the bed. Some of the heels were a bit outrageous, especially a pair of blue Manolo Blahnik pumps that looked like an invitation to ankle damage to me.

There was no way Lady Ty didn’t have a cleaner, and judging from the absence of dust in the gaps between the bannisters, he or she was coming in at least four days a week. Still, I doubted that our hypothetical cleaner had been in early enough that morning to change the linen on the neatly made bed. I looked closer – there was a dent in the coverlet and the pillows had been scrunched up. My guess was that Olivia had come back and slept on top of her bed, briefly, before me and Guleed had arrived to brighten up her day. She’d been casually dressed and freshly laundered when we’d interviewed her, which meant she must have showered and changed.

I checked the en-suite bathroom and there, on the floor, was last night’s party gear and her bath towel. I kept my distance and made a note to inform the follow-up search team so they could bag them up. I stepped back into the bedroom and tried to get a feel for Olivia.

There was a poster of Joan Armatrading facing the bed. It was a blow up of her 1976 album cover, custom framed and hung with care. It seemed a bit retro for Olivia. I mean, I only knew about Joan because she was one of the few non-jazz LPs that my dad had allowed in his collection, alongside Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a few very early Jethro Tull’s. I’d played the shit out of it when my dad wasn’t home until I’d got old enough to bootleg my own taste in music.

Next to Joan was a photo-montage sprawled across the metre or so of wall between the poster and the wardrobe door. Most of the pictures were inkjet hardcopies on standard gauge printing paper and pasted to the wall with Evo-Stik but some had obviously been cut from magazines. Fashion magazines, judging by the glossy quality of the paper – I recognised Alek Wek, Azealia Banks and a smattering of white pop stars and actors. The other photos were phone snaps – mostly selfies – Olivia at parties, clubs and school. Olivia out and about in London.

I got out my phone and took reference pictures of all the people featured in the snaps and made a rough note of how many times they appeared. One white girl was the out and out favourite – wide set blue eyes, a mass of curly black hair that either flopped untidily over her face or was pulled back into a variety of pigtails, bunches and, in one instance, elaborately piled up on her head. The latter saw her and Olivia posing in formal dresses outside somewhere gilt-edged and posh looking – they had their arms comfortably wrapped around each other’s waists and were grinning mischievously at the camera. Best Friends Forever, I decided. None of the other boys and girls turned up with anything like the same frequency and all, with the exception of one snap of her brother and another of her mother, were white.

On top of her sturdy work desk, textbooks and folders were arranged with obsessive neatness. English, Geography and French. I flicked through them looking for hidden notes, but all I found was Post-it notes and a lot of colour coded highlighter pen. One thing was for certain, Olivia had no intention of failing her A-levels. With what her mum was like I didn’t blame her. Her bookshelves were interesting, pre-teen at the bottom mixed in with a couple of board games, older books above them – Roald Dahl, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Harry Potter graduating up to Twilight, The Girls’ Book of Excellence, Malorie Blackman and, surprisingly, Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris in the original French. Because it stuck out, I opened it up and found it was full of pencilled notes in the margin – mostly English translations of difficult words. My French is actually worse than my Latin, but even I could tell that this was advanced stuff for an A-level student.

I went back to the collage and looked again – judging by the design of the frontage they were posing before, the picture of Olivia and her BFF in formal dress could well have been taken in a French city. A couple of the others definitely had Beaux-Arts architecture in the background – possibly France again. If I’d been standing in anything but a multi-million Mayfair terrace I might have been thinking of possible importation routes. But rich kids don’t need to hoof drugs over the border themselves. The rich have people for that sort of thing, and disposable people at that.

There were two mains sockets in the room, both with their own tangle of chargers and extension cords and I spent a couple of minutes matching them to her laptop, printer, her high end playbar, one spare for an iPhone that I suspected even now was being placed in front of the custody sergeant at Belgravia nick, and another spare that might have been for a different brand of phone. I made a note to check what Olivia carried, and whether it or a second phone had been handed in. A black lacquered wooden tray on the desk held paper-clips, a Post-it pad and scatter of USB sticks – those I decided to leave for the technical forensics guys from Newlands Park.

I sat on the bed, took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

I hadn’t found any controlled substances, or drug paraphernalia. It might have been hidden away, but if it was the follow-up POLSA team would find it. I couldn’t feel any vestigia in the room either. I’d always felt something with the various gods and goddesses of the rivers – even when they were reining it back on purpose – but there was nothing here apart from the usual background.

What did the child of a river and a mortal inherit, and from whom? Fleet was married to a Fae but Beverley said all her children were adopted. Oxley had Isis who had obviously caught longevity from somewhere and Effra had Oberon who Nightingale called an Old Soldier – note the capital letters.

And if I had kids with Beverley, not that kids were on the table, what would they be like – apart from staggeringly good looking of course? Would they be riverlets, streams, storm drains or just ordinary?

Which reminded me to phone Beverley.

‘Hi babes,’ she said. In the background I could hear water slapping against a vertical surface, the hull of a boat or more likely a piling of some sort. I asked her where she was.

‘Up at Eel Pie Island,’ she said. ‘Sorting out a dispute – these people are cheeky, you know. They think buying a house on an island is just another investment opportunity.’

‘Isn’t it?’ I asked. That end of Richmond/Twickenham had become hipster central since the big money had started pushing all the TV producers and literary editors out of Hampstead and Primrose Hill.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Live on an island in the middle of a river, especially this river, you’ve got to put out some signs and favours if you want to prosper. You still at my house?’

‘I’m on a shout,’ I said – obviously Beverley hadn’t heard about her niece yet.

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you’d be keeping the bed warm for me.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Listen, the job I’m on, I can’t say anything right now, but you need to contact your mum.’

‘Is this like a job job?’ asked Beverley, ‘or a magic job job?’

‘I don’t know and I’m not supposed to tell you anyway,’ I said.

‘You might be able to tell her yourself later,’ said Beverley. ‘She said she might be turning up for your dad’s gig.’

Which I’d forgotten about.

‘Just call your mum,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’

Beverley promised she would just as soon as she’d sorted out some recalcitrant islanders.

And our kids would be . . . ? I thought after we’d hung up. Good at swimming?

I wasn’t going to learn anything more in this room – it was time to hit the factory floor.

What with the jazz thing, the underground thing, the business with the haunted car, the Russians and let’s not forget the mould – however hard we try to – Belgravia MIT had bowed to the inevitable and given me my own desk in the Outside Inquiry Office. I say my own desk, but actually I shared it with Guleed and a white DC called David Carey. Neither of them were that happy with the arrangement, not least because it was a two person desk.

‘Oh, it’s going to be one of those jobs,’ said Carey when I settled in beside him. ‘Is it too late to put in for a holiday?’

I told him it was, but if he was lucky Guleed would do all the heavy lifting.

‘So long as I don’t have to deal with any more weird cars,’ he said.

The job had acquired an operational name, MARIGOLD, and a quick call to the case manager in the Inside Inquiry Office got me access to HOLMES. I entered the results of my preliminary search of Olivia’s bedroom and downloaded the pictures I’d taken of the collage on the wall. Then I went hunting to see if anyone had developed a definitive list of the kids who’d been at the party, to see if I could match them up. I did that until Carey pointed out that the current list was on the whiteboard – along with photos. I matched up Albertina Pryce to one of the pictures in Olivia’s collage but none of the others. I asked Carey whether this was the confirmed party list, but he said they were still waiting on statements.

Down the corridor in an interview room Olivia, now sitting next to a solicitor with a properly expensive suit and a suitably belligerent Scouse accent, had sensibly decided to keep her mouth shut. Guleed was pissed off, because not only had the preliminary search of the Tyburns’ house not turned up anything useful, but of the six separate sets of prints lifted from the pill packets none had matched Olivia’s. Nor, in fact, had any of the prints recovered from the flat at One Hyde Park. Guleed wanted to know if Tyburn could magic away fingerprints, but I said probably not without wiping everything else. She asked me to check with Nightingale, and I said I was sure because I’d made a point of coming up with a list of modern forensic techniques and then going through them one by one to see if Nightingale could counter them.

‘Did anything work?’ asked Guleed.

‘So far nothing,’ I said. ‘You can burn the top surfaces off a scene, but it’s pretty obvious that you’ve done it.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Guleed, who’d once seen me roast a duck by accident.

Since Olivia was seventeen she was allowed an adult to remain with her as well as her solicitor. Naturally she chose her mum, which meant that for safety’s sake Nightingale had to be in the interview room, too. Given the circumstances, DI Stephanopoulos had decided she’d better sit in too – although whether that was to maintain status for the MIT or out of sheer curiosity, no one knew or dared to ask. Stephanopoulos was a short white woman with a brown flat top haircut that had never been fashionable, even in the 1980s, and a face that relaxed into a scowl. It was rumoured that out in the suburbs there was a big house, a wife, and a garden full of chickens and tulips and rainbows and the novels of Terry Pratchett. But if there was, none of that ever made it south of the North Circular. And certainly never as far as Belgravia nick.

In the normal course of events inspectors never conduct interviews, yet Olivia merited two – I wondered if she felt special. Though she didn’t say anything useful over the course of three hours, demonstrating exactly why inspectors have better things to do than interviews. It was also why Nightingale was still in the interview room when Dr Walid called and said that he had something to show us at the mortuary.

When I told Guleed where I was going, she asked to tag along.

I asked her if she was sure.

‘It’s going to be Falcon stuff,’ I said.

‘Since I can’t seem to escape it,’ she said, ‘I figure I might as well learn a bit about it.’

‘Can’t argue with that.’

In the far off days of last year, Nightingale would have expected me to discourage her from coming, but our policy framework had changed. Earlier in the year we’d had what would have been called a ‘Multi-Agency Forward Strategy Planning Session’ if it wasn’t for the fact that it was me, Nightingale, Dr Walid and Dr Postmartin sitting down for tea in the atrium and hashing out how on earth we were going to cope with the increase in magic. The reason for the meeting was mainly that Dr Walid wanted to train up an assistant, someone with a background in your actual pathology.

‘Someone who knows more about brains than the lower intestine,’ said Dr Walid, world famous gastroenterologist.

He had his eye on a promising doctor at UCH. His problem was that he would have to come up with a budget in order to cover the salary because, strangely, after six years of continuous study, freshly minted doctors like to get paid.

‘Golf clubs not being cheap,’ I’d said.

‘Never mind golf,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Think of the overdraft.’

The result was Dr Jennifer Vaughan, a ferociously clever white woman from Newport who had entered medical school with high hopes of becoming a healer only to find that the puzzle was more interesting than the person, and she found herself gravitating downwards towards the morgue and a career in pathology. I knew way more about her life than she would have been comfortable with, including the time she’d nearly been cautioned for breaching the peace at the Supakart Centre in Newport, because I was the one who’d had to carry out the vetting process. It was your basic Baseline Personal Security Standard (BPSS) vetting that all civil servants had to undergo, plus a few extra bits we’d tacked on to cover what coppers like Seawoll liked to call ‘weird bollocks’.

I didn’t actually ask whether she herself or any member of her family had ever been a fairy, but I skated pretty close. It didn’t help that she had the kind of Welsh accent that made her sound like she was being sarcastic even when she wasn’t.

‘Are my swimming habits really a concern to the Metropolitan Police?’ she’d asked during one of the three interviews I’d conducted. I told her she’d be surprised.

‘I certainly hope so,’ she’d said. ‘Otherwise this will all have been a bit of a waste of time, won’t it?’

If you want to get the full force of her actual sarcasm, for comparative purposes, get her started on the mischaracterisation of hyperthaumaturgical degradation as a cerebrovascular disorder, strokes, aneurysms and the like, when it was quite obviously caused by direct physical trauma to the brain.

‘Admittedly, many of the signs do mirror those we see in stroke victims,’ she’d said. ‘But that’s no reason to be making assumptions, see. Especially when you have such nicely prepared brain sections to examine.’

Luckily me and Guleed weren’t subjected to your actual slices of Christina Chorley’s brain, because Dr Vaughan had already prepared a series of images which she showed us on her tablet. Even better, we were at the Ian West Memorial Forensic Suite at Westminster Mortuary which had a glassed-off observation room which meant that we didn’t have to smell the bodies either. Trust me, this is a bonus even with a nice fresh corpse like Ms Chorley.

I introduced Guleed to the doctors Vaughan and Walid. They shook hands and then Dr Walid leant casually against a work surface with his arms folded and watched while Dr Vaughan took us through her findings.

‘This was the cause of death,’ she said pointing to a smudge.

I caught Dr Walid’s eye and asked if it was a cerebral aneurysm.

‘No,’ said Dr Vaughan slowly. ‘It is not an aneurysm because an aneurysm is caused by a weakening in a blood vessel which distends over time and then, if one is unlucky, ruptures causing an intracranial bleed. Which as we know is not very good for the brain, is it?’

‘But that’s intracranial bleeding,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen slides like this before.’

‘That may be so, but it is not caused by an aneurysm,’ she said and Guleed gave me a pitying look.

Guleed always knew how to keep her mouth shut, and had this mad way of just fading into the background whenever she wanted to. Well, we all have our ways of dealing with difficulties – mine is to ask stupid questions.

‘It’s not natural causes, though,’ I said. ‘Is it?’

‘Well,’ said Dr Vaughan, ‘here’s the thing. If you look at this close-up here – see where the brain looks spongy? These are indications of tiny points of tissue damage to the brain.’

‘Caused by what?’ I asked.

Dr Walid chuckled and Dr Vaughan sighed.

‘To be honest, my guess would be that somebody sliced open her brain, pricked it with narrow bore needles and then reassembled the brain – seamlessly mind you – and then popped it back in her head with her none the wiser.’

‘That seems an unlikely scenario,’ I said.

‘It does, doesn’t it,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘In any case, one of these pinpricks also jabbed a blood vessel, which led to the intracranial bleeding, which was the ultimate cause of death.’

I asked what caused the pinpricks, if not narrow bore needles, and Dr Vaughan gave me a sunny smile.

‘As you know, I’ve been reviewing Dr Walid’s casework,’ she said. ‘And reviewing the “literature” he’s supplied on related subjects. Now, to be fair to the colleagues that came before us, these gentlemen didn’t have access to modern imaging techniques, but even so they can be remarkably vague as to the distinction between cerebrovascular and physical trauma. However, they did leave some excellent specimens behind.’

A room full of them, I knew, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century. Apparently it was good form in the old days for a wizard to leave his body to the Folly along with his notebooks, unreturned library books and any spare valuables he had lying around – cash, antiques, good quality arable land in the Midlands or home counties. It was the land bequests that underpinned the charitable fund that was paying Dr Vaughan’s salary.

‘You’d better not tell the Hunterian you’ve got these,’ Dr Vaughan had said when she was introduced to the Folly’s collection. ‘Or they’d be down here backing up a lorry to your front door and no mistake.’

Now she studied her tablet. ‘Many of them show the same pattern of pinprick injury,’ she said. ‘It’s too early to reach a firm conclusion, but this pattern of organic brain damage matches the early stages of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.’

‘She was a practitioner?’ I asked.

‘Or the victim of sequestration,’ said Dr Walid.

Sequestration . . . There were some terrible things that could get inside your head and make you do stuff both physically and magically. Such things had no compunction about using you up and letting you die, as the overuse of magic turns your brain into Swiss cheese.

Mr Punch was one such thing.

Still they appeared to be quite rare, so Christina being a practitioner was more likely. There’s no such thing as magical talent – anyone can learn magic the way anyone can learn to play the guitar. It’s just that trying to tackle the opening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ isn’t going to kill you. Well, not directly anyway. You also don’t learn it spontaneously. Somebody’s got to teach you the basics, even if that’s just three chords and a vigorous strumming action.

Dr Vaughan concurred that sequestration was unlikely.

‘Self-taught?’ I asked.

‘The pathology can’t really tell us how,’ he said. ‘But according to the pre-war literature, fully trained practitioners rarely injured themselves to this degree.’

After all, not killing yourself was the point of quite a lot of the training.

‘So,’ said Guleed. ‘Does this mean she was doing magic when she died?’

‘You said the M-word,’ I said, but Guleed ignored me.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘The PMA she took could have raised her blood pressure to the point where a blood vessel, weakened by the organic damage, gave way. The seizures and other symptoms would have been incidental to the cause of death.’

A pre-existing medical condition wasn’t going to help Olivia McAllister-Thames, because supplying the drugs was in and of itself an unlawful act. So it wouldn’t serve as defence in law. Still manslaughter. Still a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for Olivia, and a lifetime in the shit for me.

‘If Christina was a trainee witch . . .’ said Guleed.

‘Wizard,’ said Dr Walid – just as I said, ‘Practitioner.’

Guleed exchanged a look with Dr Vaughan.

‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘If she was. And if she wasn’t self-taught, who taught her?’

‘Good question.’ I said. ‘Perhaps we should go ask her father.’